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Building scale is better in CS? In CS the widest building is 4 cars in length. They look ridiculous...The biggest skyscraper is smaller than a single family home's yard. The biggest parking lot is the size of a bus stop.
Agree- One of the things I personally miss most from SC4 was the large yards in the more lavish neighborhoods, and the larger sizes of the "max build" skyscraper lot sizes. For that period in time, it really seemed the scale was more on.
Like I have said too many times on this forum, for me, the biggest turnoff is the max 4x4 groweable zone sizes, the architectural style (which can be "modded" but the base model set design direction wasn't great, and the more mods added, it appears the longer load times, problems)
The thing that really left a bad taste though was the lack of actual city simulation.. This city simulation makes the classic error it seems every city builder (even SC 4 exhaggerated skylines) seems to make: Way too many tall buildings, way too early.
I would feel better about having an extremely tall skyline to city size ratio had I built some amazing port to drive up commerce, becoming a global hub, or a fantastic cargo airport, or a huge fishing economy, or something- but for a city as small as most of the ones we have made have been.. the building heights are ridiculous.. Look at most North-American cities or European cities as examples: How many cities as small as our in CSL would have that many skyscrapers? None. Maybe Benidorm, but that's because of tourism/ocean views (proximity to water/ocean cliff views for land value is another layer that would have been fun that was left out).
There is no reason some Podunk town with a couple of bus routes should have such a large skyline, and when the skyline starts to grow, there isn't any focus to it really, it's just where you zoned dense commercial.. Offices don't seem to grow very much.
Industrial looks good, (minus purple ground pollution, not sure what they were thinking there) but it would be nice to see actual goods- generic containers or whatever actually filling rail yards/airport warehouses etc.. like they had back in the original A-train..
Which kind of brings me to the rather simple shipping/ airport functionality. This game would have had so much value added with am emphasis on modularity in building construction, and a larger view for aviation- and Aerobiz Supersonic esque airline aspect (simplified) would have created an actual reason for that runway expansion, or terminal expansion.
A new freight deal with Golactic out of Anchorage would be the reason you had to increase your freight handling infrastructure, cargo terminal, and fueling at your airport.
Again, these are kind of "DLC" type things, but I worry that if we weren't in the age of DLC they would have been included upon launch.. but who knows.
Even Sim City 2000 had groweable port zones, and airport zones.. Albeit, they were just filler structures, but it was the right direction. With a modular design to airport and port construction, an economic demand aspect of growing those large infrastructure projects, and planning ahead for an area appropriate to accommodate growth would have been great. Instead we have these semi-working ports (ships seem to sail into the land a lot) and a one-size fits all airpot..
There doesn't seem to be any sort of valuable interconnectedness to the "outside world" - I was hoping that, using a "measurement type" max groweable city tile, we would see much larger maps, simply stitching together the smaller 25km2 map size in CSL.. Kind of like the model SC4 worked, but just using squares to simplify things.
That way, you could create a map of England, it would just use a scale of 10km in each direction, so creating an airline or shipping route could be simply calculated, even if the data coming from the other map was simply generated using the Pythagorean theorem.. just give us something using a much larger heightmap, and things could get larger, but as it is, we appear to be capped.. I understand why they limited city sizes, but don't understand why the didn't include more inter-regional connectivity, vis-a-vis SC4 so things could get larger, even if it was simply a regional view of the larger picture.
The other main thing that continues to bother me is the "snap to road" building restriction. Ideally, a structure should be allowed to be built anywhere, just not function correctly if a road connection isn't added after the fact. Hopefully this will be fixed.
CSL was groundbreaking with the flowing water, road/rail construction simplicity and flexibility, and map sizes, but continues to lack in other areas, which give it a "hollow" feeling. I do not see a City Skyline, I see a flat-top looking city with way too many skyscrapers, and for me, that's a simulation letdown.
Again, there are elements of the game which are fantastic, and giant steps forward, but it is fundamentally flawed as a city simulator.
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